About

Dr Valentin Heller is currently an Associate Professor in Hydraulics in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Nottingham and a member of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Geoprocesses Research Group. Before moving to the University of Nottingham, he held one of the prestigious Imperial College London Research Fellowships, a Research Fellowship at the University of Southampton and a postdoctoral position at ETH Zurich. He received his PhD and MSc in Civil Engineering from ETH Zurich.

Career Type:

Scientist/Researcher/Academic

Organization Type:

Universities and Academia

Expertise Fields/Interests:

Dr Heller is mainly active in Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics with applications into fluid-structure interactions from small to very large scale. The fluid is typically water and the structure a coastal or hydraulic structure such as a dam, wall, a landslide or iceberg. His research team applies a wide range of measurement systems (Particle Image Velocimetry, laser distance sensors, load cells) and open source codes such as DualSPHysics, OpenFOAM, SWASH and LIGGGHTS-DEM. Recent research applications in coastal and hydraulic engineering include wave-flexible-structure interaction (e.g. Attili et al. 2021), iceberg-tsunamis (e.g. Heller et al. 2019; Chen et al. 2020), novel scaling laws in air-water flows (e.g. Catucci et al. 2021), scale effects in granular slides (e.g. Kesseler et al. 2020) or the effect of the water body geometry and bathymetry on landslide-tsunamis (e.g. Ruffini et al. 2019; 2021).

Major Achievements:

17th Harold Jan Schoemaker Award from IAHR in 2013 for the review article "Scale effects in physical hydraulic engineering models".